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Exporting data from MySQL: unusual strategies

I use to spend much time playing with data in order to import, export and aggregate it. MySQL is one on my primary source of data because stays behind many popular projects and is usually first choice also for custom solutions.

Recently I discovered some really useful unknown functions which help me to export complex data.

The SELECT * INTO OUTFILE statement is intended primarily to let you very quickly dump a table to a text file on the server machine. It is really useful to export data as CSV directly from your master server. You can also use DUMPFILE if you need a raw output.

If you database is bigger than you are able to manage you probably need Sqoop. It is is a tool designed for efficiently transferring bulk data between Apache Hadoop and structured datastores such as relational databases.

You can import data from you MySQL database to a CSV file stored on HDFS and access it from anywhere in your cluster.